“Unsuitable” Books: Young Adult Fiction and Censorship by Caren J. Town, and: Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites (review)

Authors and critics of adolescent literature have long argued for its significance to the adolescent experience of its readers. In the two books under review, Caren J. Town and Roberta Seelinger Trites weigh in on the nature of this significance in vastly different ways. In “Unsuitable” Books: Young Adult Fiction and Censorship, Town joins the fight to keep controversial literature for young adults in our libraries and schools by emphasizing its helpfulness to young people navigating the experience of adolescence. In Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature, the second volume of John Benjamins’s Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition (CLCC) series, Trites examines and interrogates the seemingly ubiquitous growth narrative that underpins most adolescent literature. Each book, aimed at a different audience (Town’s at teachers and library media specialists; Trites’s at fellow scholars), focuses our attention on the messages we send about adolescence via its literature and our treatment thereof.

With “Unsuitable” Books: Young Adult Fiction and Censorship, Caren J. Town sets out to “help give teachers and media specialists some of the ammunition they need in the fight against censorship” (1). In order to do so, Town’s main chapters focus on various well-known authors and texts that have appeared on the American Library Association’s Most Frequently Challenged Books list over the past several decades. While information about censorship informs a portion of the book—chapter one briefly surveys several issues pertinent to the problem of censorship in American public schools and the conclusion details “challenges ahead” (167) facing the teachers and librarians to whom the text is addressed—Town’s book is largely devoted to critical analyses that convey her praise for the texts under question.

Each chapter develops a critical stance on the ways in which a particular work or works illuminate and wrestle with issues central to the adolescent experience. Town’s discussions are enriched by her engagement with literary critics who both bolster and challenge her own claims, and often she pays homage to the ambiguity of thematic import that tends to rankle censors who would rather a clear, positive, and arguably simplistic message be sent to readers. Running through the entire volume is an emphasis on the way these novels “tell the truth” (3), and on these truths Town has rested the force of her arguments, whether they are about exposing the realities of racism or encouraging the spirit of the individual. For instance, she defends the value of Mildred D. Taylor’s Cassie Logan stories by pointing out the “balance between empathy and outrage” (102) Taylor provokes by her portrayal of the Logan family’s saga in late nineteenth- / early twentieth-century Mississippi, and she details the way Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves creates a protagonist who “longs for and then rejects various culture and animal options [for identity], moving, eventually toward a hybrid identity all her own” (39). Here, Town posits, is a protagonist who provides readers “analogies to their own growth and development” (46).

One of the strengths of Town’s book is that it elevates the typical discussion of censorship in public schools from the personal reactions of its often uninformed or overpressured stakeholders to the arena of literary criticism. This is not to say, of course, that teachers in our public schools do not engage in the discourse of literary analysis regularly (I speak from experience here, as a former English/Language Arts teacher and a current educator of preservice teachers). Rather, due to the time-sensitive nature of most local censorship attempts (concerned parents, for instance, often want texts removed from shelves immediately or their child removed from a classroom within hours of an e-mail or phone call), teachers and librarians can find themselves forced...